In a row of houses, dark as the night, still as the ones in slumber, a room remains alight.
Here was a boy on his bed, sitting up, awake as ever, leaning ever so slightly towards the man sitting at the bed's edge - who is equally wide awake and equally animated as he. Deep as the pair of son and father found that they were in these hallowed hours, deeper yet they were in the trenches of the stories that came unspooling between them. The stories were vivid - the raining of rocks, the collision of oceans, whales and camels and elephants and more. They were nearing the end of a third story when the boy, eyes bright as the glow of the room, holds up his hand. The father, so taken was he in the story he was telling, saw the hand help up and abruptly stopped.
"What is it?" the father asks, and his voice is almost that of a whisper, their being as quiet as can be the only compromise they would make for the night.
"The stars," the boy answers. That is all that he answers, but what he means by it is immediately clear to the both of them.
The exchange between them, this storytelling dance - the father, in his telling; the son, in his requests - came about only occasionally; much of the other time they could have otherwise spend together lost to the demands of a world that kept them more often apart. But it is a choreography that could challenge even the most rehearsed. An obsession, as others would call it, that they had much too often had to curb. But not tonight.
A nod. A smile between them. An inhale and then-
"When you look up to the stars, look twice," the father begins, descending into the night with a fourth story.
The light in the room stays on.
🎕
(escapril, day 6)
